Alas, it appears that Adobe Pagemaker is finally dead. Sniff. My college paper was published entirely on Pagemaker for many years (I think they just switched to Quark a year or two ago), and I spent many collegiate hours futzing around in Pagemaker 3.0 and 4.2. (I’ve still got a pirate copy of 4.2 somewhere on floppy.) I’ve heard Glenn Fleishman, who was one of the paper’s early editors before becoming King of all Things Wifi, tell some great stories about cutting and pasting together Pagemaker printouts on dorm room floors at 5 a.m. before going to press.
I think someone should write a book-length ode to Pagemaker, arguably the single most revolutionary computer application ever written (yeah, Mosaic would probably edge it out, but it’s close). It democratized publishing and access to the media in a way few technologies had since Gutenberg. It’s no coincidence that the Herald was founded in February 1986, only seven months after Pagemaker 1.0 was released. And I know the Herald was far from the only one. Credit for making those sort of small-scale publications possible really goes to Apple and Pagemaker.
The Pagemaker portion of that credit goes to many people, of course, but the organizing force behind it all was Paul Brainerd. He was a newspaper reporter who thought the young Mac would make a good platform for publishing. Read that last link for a good summary of Pagemaker’s early days and Brainerd’s ideas. As one person puts it on that page:
“PageMaker was the app the Mac had been waiting for to give customers a reason to buy it. Without desktop publishing, the Mac probably would have followed the Lisa into oblivion and Bill Gates would have nothing to copy and we’d still be typing in at the C prompt. In a fundamental way, Paul Brainerd saved the universe.”
After selling his company (Aldus) to Adobe in 1994, he focused his energies on The Brainerd Foundation, whose goal is protecting the environment of the Pacific Northwest. He’s also the founder of IslandWood, an outdoor learning center for Seattle-area kids, and Social Venture Partners, a group that uses a venture capital model to link up worthy causes with philanthropists.
I know Pagemaker fell out of favor with professionals a long time ago, first to Quark and more recently to InDesign (my layout program of choice). But here’s a tip of the hat to the late great Pagemaker, the revolutionary. Perhaps Steve Jobs, when he talks about the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Macintosh at his MacWorldSF keynote tomorrow, should heap some praise on the program most responsible for his company’s success.
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Brainerd was a very savvy sales and marketing guy with a vision, but the programmers who built the first stuff were pretty tremendous as well, and are kind of left out of later stories. They went on to found Visio which was acquired by Microsoft for a bazillion dollars or so and remains a practically sui generis product that has vast sales and a handful of also-ran competitors.